10 Video Game Spinoffs We Never Asked For

From rhythm games based on RPGs to television simulators where it really feels like you’re watching a TV, we count 15 outrageous, unbelievably unnecessary spin-offs to beloved gaming franchises

10 – Hey You, Pikachi!

We’re all familiar with the pokemon cash-grabs from the days when it was big, and this is a game that barely registers with the franchise

Basically, you get a microphone addon called a VRU, a yellow ball for your controller through which you can talk to Pikachu as if he were real and not a bunch of polygons on a screen

The problem was, the microphone sucked ass, and this is the only game to ever use it, so you’d be yelling for Pikachu to collect some fish and he’d stare at you for hours

Such fun

9 – Dirge of Cerberus

A spin-off of the massively successful Playstation RPG Final Fantasy VII, but in pretty much all the wrong ways

The main character wasn’t just a side character in the series, he was entirely optional and most people didn’t even know who he was

Instead of an RPG, the game was a third-person shooter, a genre Square Enix had never attempted before – and it showed

The AI was a mess, level design shoddy, an overabundance of cutscenes that don’t advance the already convoluted and dull storyline with mainly side or barely-existent characters from Final Fantasy VII as the stars

Want we want is a Final Fantasy VII remake, not this garbled mess

8 – Typing of the Dead

People actually sat down in a board room and thought, gee, you know what the House of the Dead franchise needs? A computer literacy element

So out comes this garbage where, instead of shooting zombies, you type words to defeat them – basically a type teaching simulator with zombies, like you’d find in primary school

But even worse is that the words and phrases weren’t even decent – you got bang-bang, or ping-pong, socrates, Washington, and Your Mom

What an instant classic

7 – Shadow the Hedgehog

Here we go, the latest chunk of vomit spewed from the Sonic Team, a grimdark spin-off for Shadow the Hedgehog with guns, motorcycles, explosions and other things that would be gnarly if the game didn’t suck ass-moisture

Most Sonic fans were fine with the series light-hearted theme, and this attempt at a mature theme came off seriously desperate

Like Dirge of Cerberus, the team obviously weren’t ready for shooter controls since things like the homing attack led to a crapton of character deaths, guns had a lousy auto-aim that made playing a chore

It’s a game that appealed to the wrong demographic, and did it in terrible ways

6 – Hotel Mario

This is a Mario spin-off that Nintendo didn’t even make, it was built for the Philips CD-i – that console nobody owned, and this game was developed by Philips themselves to sell units

The gist of the game is that you’re supposed to close doors to stop Bowser’s hotel scheme from taking place, okay, that’s it, that’s all you gotta do, just go around closing doors

Wired magazine even went so far as to say that it’s a “puzzle game with no puzzles”, just shutting doors in a timely manner

The worst part though: animations, ones that look like they were drawn in MS: Paint with cringeworthy voice acting and Luigi’s infamous line “SPAGHETTI”